SV-POW! … All sauropod vertebrae, except when we're talking about Open Access

Introducing VertFigure, a better name for vcd2svg

April 12, 2014

Five days ago, I released a program for drawing comparative figures of vertebral columns, such as this one from our neural-spine bifurcation paper. With my idiot computer-scientist hat on, I gave that program the startlingly unmemorable name vcd2svg — the reasoning being that it takes Vertebral Column Descriptions and translates them into Scalable Vector Graphics.

The name is a bit opaque. It sounds like a tool for people who have VCD files and want to convert them to SVG. Maybe this means extracting frames from Video CD files as SVG (a rather inappropriate format)? :)

Your target users don’t have VCD files, don’t want to convert anything, and have little or no preference for SVG. They want to make diagrams of vertebrae.

A fair point. Accordingly, I have renamed the program VertFigure — a name chosen in part because Google doesn’t know of anything else with the same name. The canonical GitHub page is now http://github.com/MikeTaylor/VertFigure but the old address still works, and git checkouts made from the old name will also continue to work. The command-line program that does the conversion is now also named VertFigure.